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June 22, 2018court decisionprivacycriminal justice

Supreme Court requires a warrant for cell-site location data in Carpenter v. United States

The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the government generally needs a warrant to obtain a week or more of a person's historical cell-site location records, holding that the third-party doctrine does not extend to this data. The decision set the constitutional baseline that data brokers and government purchasers would later work around.